#AskingAutistics #Neurodivergent #AuDHD #ADHD #ActuallyAutistic (that's me)
Subject: Food/eating
Tell me..
- one thing that helped you as a child (or would've helped)
- one thing that didn't help you at all
...around eating & food, when you were a child.
Reboosts also appreciated ☺️
Things parents should know:
Sensory stuff can hugely exaggerate tiny(to you) differences in textures or flavours. This means that even a safe food can be wrong if cooked differently, prep'd differently or even just left too long (cold/hot affects textures and mouthfeel). Different brands might as well be different products. Mixing foods affects textures 'ruining' them.
Fruit and veg can vary in feel/texture withal/ripeness, so can easily trigger texture sensitivities.
worst for me was 'but you like *this* food' - it was different and wrong, but I didn't have the language to understand *why* and how it was different (texture variations, or mixed textures are a huge turnoff for me).
To reduce stress at mealtimes, focus on consistency and predictability.
Same plate, forks, cups is a cheap way to help sameness.
Use kitchen timers and microwaves to maintain same cooking times.
Don't 'experiment' with recipes unless planned, or provide a safe option (e.g. split and experiment with just half).
Beware contamination and 'bits' - finding a bone or gristle can put me off a food for weeks.
use a stick blender to create soups, and adjust texture/consistency with boiling water to keep things the same. I can deal with quite a range of tastes, it's the textures that trigger me.
@RenoirDana
Oh my!! So much interesting and useful info!
Thank you so much 😊
I read the 'CW' and title, and got extremely happy - evening before opening it. Something about the word 'infodump' and then prefixed with a topic I'm truly interested in.
Fabulous. You've made my evening 😍
A bit more of a personal story useful?
I had big food issues as a kid. Particular textures, especially mixed like skins/soft and soft/sauce I can't deal with.
My mum says that as soon as I learned 'no', from about 1yr/18m onward, there were some foods I would just refuse to eat.
Very early on, my brain formed a map (attached).
Because of a few intensely awful experiences, I formed 'safe rules' - Basically no fruit and no veg. Because of certain triggers, anything similar was also suspect, leaving me only a very narrow path of safe foods.
Moving off the safe path, even in just the direction (e.g. a single orange segment used as cake decoration) caused huge anxiety.
Anxiety -> stress ->adrenaline->no appetite.
The 'edges' of these triggers were unclear, and it was a stressful time. Eating was like a lottery, each bite was like is this ok.... yes?, because triggers were so uncomfortable.
As an adult (>35), I have been able to carefully explore these boundaries and produce a better, safer map. These days, I can eat apples, strawberries, and several specific vegetables so my diet is a little more varied. Many of my old aversions still produce the same reaction though.
As an example, I was invited to a 'meet the brass' lunch meeting at work. While talking with the CTO, chatting and eating, I took a bite of what I thought was a chocolate chip muffin, but was actually a rasin muffin. The adrenaline kicked in and spat it straight onto my plate. Oops.
K.J. Elphinstone
Renoir Dana 